Texas Labor Against the War

by Eugine Robinson, Washington Post, reprinted from U.S. Labor Against the War Website

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Barack Obama didn’t set out to be a “war president,” but that’s what history compels him to be. The nation and the world are fortunate that he doesn’t have the reckless, ready-fire-aim mentality of George W. Bush. But Afghanistan doesn’t present the kind of “false choices” that Obama, by nature, habitually rejects. The choices are real and awful, and no amount of reframing and rephrasing will make them go away.

Monday’s tragic events — 14 Americans killed in helicopter crashes in Afghanistan — remind us of the decisions Obama faces. At least he seems to recognize that he can’t just let the situation drift.

But it looks as if Obama’s inclination is to disappoint both hawks and doves — and, yes, I’m consciously using Vietnam-era language. The debate over whether we stay or leave is bound to become sharper and more passionate as American casualties continue to mount.

One person who deserves no voice in that debate is Dick Cheney, who helped get us into this quagmire. By turning from Afghanistan prematurely to launch an elective, unnecessary and ill-advised invasion of Iraq, Bush and Cheney managed to transform one war we were winning into two that we were in danger of losing.

For Cheney to charge that Obama is “dithering” over sending more troops to Afghanistan, when he and Bush ignored a troop request from U.S. commanders for the better part of a year, is obscene. For Cheney to complain that Obama ought to simply accept the Bush administration’s in-depth analysis of the situation in Afghanistan, rather than conduct his own careful review, is a sick joke.

That said, Afghanistan is Obama’s war now. And his considerable successes in pursuing his ambitious domestic agenda teach him nothing about how to proceed.

His basic method has been to avoid drawing bright lines between mutually exclusive positions. He looks for ways to reframe issues so that what once was an either-or proposition can be transformed into a both-and scenario. On health care, for example, he set out to provide both universal coverage and long-term cost control. The legislation that now seems likely to emerge doesn’t quite do either, but it does some of each — and Obama, by splitting the difference, has managed to bring us closer to meaningful, though imperfect, health-care reform than we’ve ever been.

But the decisions on Afghanistan truly are either-or. Obama can decide to pursue a counterinsurgency strategy or a counterterrorism strategy. He can do one or the other — not both. If he chooses counterinsurgency, he has to send enough troops to make that strategy work. If he doesn’t want to send all those troops, he needs to pursue counterterrorism or do something else.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan who has devised the counterinsurgency strategy, is asking for 40,000 or more additional troops. Obama is right to examine the general’s calculations, but it would make no sense to try a middle path and approve, say, a troop increase of 20,000. That would just put more Americans in harm’s way without giving McChrystal the resources he says he needs. This game’s been going on for eight years. It’s time to raise or fold.

Obama has required members of his national security team to read “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon Goldstein. The book is about McGeorge Bundy, one of the architects of the Vietnam War, and his late-in-life regrets at having helped drag the nation into a costly, unwinnable war. It’s unclear, though, whether Obama is prepared to heed the book’s central lesson.

Obama is at the key juncture: in or out. If he ratifies the counterinsurgency strategy and approves a troop increase, he’ll be committing the United States to see the project through to its end. Advisers say the president’s goals for “fixing” Afghanistan are realistic, even modest. To me, however, the whole enterprise looks unrealistic and immodest.

We invaded Afghanistan to ensure that the country could never again be used to launch attacks against the United States. That mission is accomplished, and our only goal should be making sure it stays accomplished — whether the place is run by Hamid Karzai or the Taliban. The counterinsurgency campaign that Obama is contemplating looks like a step onto the slipperiest slope imaginable. It doesn’t matter whether the step is tentative or bold.

Sometimes a “war president” has to decide to start bringing the troops home. That’s what Obama must do.

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Alexander the Great, the Persian Empire, Great Britain, the Soviet Union–all failed in their military occupations of Afghanistan.   Says Zamir Kabulov, Russian ambassador in Kabul, The U.S. has “already repeated all of our mistakes.”

by ROBERT MACKEY Raheb Homavandi/Reuters

September 21, 2009

An exhibit on the failed Soviet occupation of Afghanistan at a war museum in Herat, a city in the west of the country that also contains the remains of a citadel built by Alexander the Great.

Now that word has leaked out that Gen.  Stanley A.  McChrystal, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, has concluded that he will need more than 68,000 American troops to defeat the Taliban, the natural question is: how many foreign troops does it take to secure Afghanistan?

The fast answer is that no one really knows, since, as even late-night comics have noticed recently, armies have been failing to do it for centuries.

On Saturday the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar, weighed in with an op-ed of sorts posted on a Taliban Web site — helpfully made available in English, as well as Pashto, Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, Finnish, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Somali and Malay/Indonesian — noting that history has not been kind to foreign forces seeking to control Afghanistan, “from the time of the aggression of Alexander.” Mullah Omar invoked a somewhat more recent example as well, pointing out that the Afghans “fought against the British invaders for eighty years from 1839 to 1919 and ultimately got independence by defeating Britain.” While the world has obviously changed a good bit since Alexander arrived in Afghanistan with an army reinforced by elephants, or the British seized temporary control of the country in 1878 with 33,500 troops, it has only been 20 years since the Soviet military tried and failed to fend off an insurgency by Islamic militants against an Afghan government they had supported.

In February 1989, when the Soviets finally withdrew from the country a report in The Times by Bill Keller noted:

Today’s final departure is the end of a steady process of withdrawal since last spring, when Moscow says, there were 100,300 Soviet troops in Afghanistan.  At the height of the Soviet commitment, according to Western intelligence estimates, there were 115,000 troops deployed.

On Monday, my colleagues Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker reported that the largest troop increase currently under consideration would bring the total number of American troops there to 113,000 — almost exactly the same size as the Soviet force:

Pentagon and military officials involved in Afghanistan policy say General McChrystal is expected to propose a range of options for additional troops beyond the 68,000 American forces already approved, from 10,000 more troops to as many as 45,000.

As The Lede noted in March, when Mullah Omar issued a call for help from Pakistani militants, there are an estimated 15,000 Taliban fighters on each side of the exceedingly porous border.  On the day the Soviets departed in 1989, the BBC reported that “Kabul is surrounded by a mujahedeen force of around 30,000.” It seems reasonable to ask if a force roughly the same size as the Soviet one, aided by about 30,000 NATO troops, is big enough to defeat this Afghan insurgency.  The Americans do have some advantages the Soviets lacked.  In this struggle, Pakistan’s military and intelligence services are, to some extent, helping to undermine the insurgents, who are not being armed by a rival superpower.  Despite signs of rising discontent with the current Afghan government, the Taliban may also have less popular support than the mujahedeen enjoyed in the 1980s.

Although it is hard to conduct accurate surveys in Afghanistan, in one opinion poll carried out earlier this year for British and American broadcasters, just 4 per cent of Afghans surveyed said that they would like to see the Taliban return to power.

On the other hand, Afghanistan’s population is estimated to have doubled since 1979, so this foreign force now has to find away to police and provide basic security to about twice as many people as the Soviet one.

Instead of looking just at failed occupations of Afghanistan, it might be worth looking at what how many troops were deployed during the successful occupation of postwar Germany in the 1940s.  According to a Rand corporation study called “America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,” the U.S.  peacekeeping force in the one-quarter of postwar Germany it controlled in 1945 (an area that then had a population of about 17 million people and no active insurgency) included more than 290,000 soldiers and “a constabulary or police-type occupation force” of 38,000.

Looking closer to home, consider that there are nearly 38,000 police officers in New York City, patrolling an area of just 300 square miles, with a population of 8.3 million.  Given that, it is no wonder that Gen.  McChrystal thinks it might be tough to provide security to 30 million Afghans and police 250,000 square miles of mostly mountainous terrain with even 100,000 troops.

Then again, it is also possible that too large a force, rather than subduing Afghanistan, could serve to provoke the Afghan people.

One man who has suggested that more American troops are not the answer is Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, who was a K.G.B.
agent in Kabul during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.  Last October Mr.  Kabulov told my colleague John Burns that the U.S.  had “already repeated all of our mistakes,” and moved on to “making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright.” One of the biggest mistakes the Soviets made, Mr.  Kabulov said, was letting the force grow too large.  “The more foreign troops you have roaming the country,” he said, “the more the irritative allergy toward them is going to be provoked.”

This Month’s Iraq Moratorium event is sponsored by CodePink Austin.  See http://www.codepinkaustin.com/index.html

Iraq Moratorium
Friday, December 19th
5:00 p.m.
State Capitol building – south entrance
11th and Congress

This month’s message: Give Troops a Gift,
Bring Them Home Now!

Activists will present a resolution opposing the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the general assembly of the Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186, to be held Oct. 3 – 5 in Austin. The resolution will be an endorsement of the antiwar resolution passed in June at the national convention of the Communication Workers of America, TSEU’s parent union.

Here’s the CWA resolution. We will publish the proposed TSEU resolution when its wording is finalized.

2008 CWA Convention Resolution: Working for Peace and Labor Rights in Iraq
Communications Workers of America
June 28th, 2008
Resolution 70A-08-9

The military actions of the Bush administration in the Middle East have reached a critical point, one which may commit future administrations to an expanded war. The costs of that war are now running over $341 million per day and total more than $531 billion to date. These costs will be borne by generations to come.

The money spent on this war could be spent to repair our nation’s infrastructure and restore social programs that have been devastated by years of Republican neglect. But the cost in human Iives is even more important, with 4,104 of our young men and women killed to date, over 30,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children killed.

The Iraqi labor movement also has been devastated. It is increasingly dangerous to be a union leader in Iraq. The Iraqi labor movement reports that union property has been seized and destroyed, bank accounts have been frozen, and leaders have been abducted, arrested and assassinated. With their lives in danger, many labor leaders have been forced to leave the country.

Following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority kept intact a 1987 decree by Saddam Hussein outlawing unions in the public sector and in public enterprises. This ban has been continued by the current government of Nouri Al-Maliki. In place of free union elections, the government is imposing an elections process. This is an affront to the principles of free trade unionism and counter to the Iraqi government’s 2004 pledge to create a law that would comply with International Labor Organization (ILO) standards and guarantee workers the right to form their own trade unions.

A coalition of international labor rights organizations, including the AFL-CIO, is calling for the lraqi government to cease its interference with lraqi unions and to respect workers’ rights to form unions. In the United States, local unions, state and regional labor organizations and others have built a solidarity network – U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW). USLAW has sponsored two visits by lraqi trade unionists to the United States and continues to provide a key link between U.S. workers and our brothers and sisters in the Iraqi labor movement.

RESOLVED: CWA continues to support our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and believes that the best support is to bring them home and give them all medical treatment, care and benefits they need and deserve.

RESOLVED: CWA encourages all Locals to unite with labor unions here and internationally in the growing movement against the war and to deepen their active solidarity with the Iraqi trade unionists.

RESOLVED: CWA Joins with the AFL-CIO and other labor organizations to call on the lraqi government to take immediate steps to bring Iraq into compliance with International Labor Organization core labor standards.